Major bug with bookmarks in oort 0.05

[andreas.koenig@anima.de (Andreas J. Koenig)]

A few days or weeks ago I used the bookmark command unintentionally
for the first time ever. It's "M b" on the current article. Since I
did that, my two files ~/.newsrc.eld and ~/Mail/king-99/.marks started
to grow exponentially. When they reached 25 MB today, the machine
became pretty sluggish.

I could rescue the damage by manually editing the two files: I had to
remove the whole expression from "(bookmark " to the matching paren in
each of the two files.

I can reproduce the bug now:

1. Start emacs and gnus
2. Enter a newsgroup
3. Open an article
4. Press "M b"
5. leave group, leave gnus, leave emacs

6. Run an ls -l on ~/.newsrc.eld and the .marks file of the newsgroup
   chosen in step 2
7. Start emacs again, enter gnus
8. Enter the newsgroup chosen above. No need to select any article there.
9. Leave group, leave gnus, leave emacs

Repeat 6-9. Any time I repeat, the two files are growing.

Here's a perl program that writes a small report on the two files. It
needs to be adjusted to the newsgroup you choose:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use strict; $|=1;
for my $file (qw(.newsrc.eld Mail/king-99/.marks)){
    printf "                    File: %s\n", $file;
    printf "                    Size: %d\n", -s $file;
    local($/);
    open F, $file or die; $_ = <F>; close F;
    / ( \(bookmark ( ( \( [\d\s\.]+ \) )+ | \s* )+ \) ) /x;
    printf "Length of bookmarkstring: %d\n", length($1||"");
    printf "          Bookmarkstring: %s\n", $1||"";
}

Sample output 1:

                    File: .newsrc.eld
                    Size: 140640
Length of bookmarkstring: 58
          Bookmarkstring: (bookmark (32035 . 0) (32035 . 0) (32035 . 0) (32035 . 0))
                    File: Mail/king-99/.marks
                    Size: 28340
Length of bookmarkstring: 106
          Bookmarkstring: (bookmark (32035 . 0) (32035 . 0) (32035 . 0) (32035 . 0) (32035 . 0) (32035 . 0) (32035 . 0) (32035 . 0))


Sample output 2:

                    File: .newsrc.eld
                    Size: 140676
Length of bookmarkstring: 94
          Bookmarkstring: (bookmark (32035 . 0) (32035 . 0) (32035 . 0) (32035 . 0) (32035 . 0) (32035 . 0) (32035 . 0))
                    File: Mail/king-99/.marks
                    Size: 28424
Length of bookmarkstring: 190
          Bookmarkstring: (bookmark (32035 . 0) (32035 . 0) (32035 . 0) (32035 . 0) (32035 . 0) (32035 . 0) (32035 . 0) (32035 . 0) (32035 . 0) (32035 . 0) (32035 . 0) (32035 . 0) (32035 . 0) (32035 . 0) (32035 . 0))



My emacs is 21.1, my gnus is oort 0.05. Please let me know if you need
additional info.



-- 
andreas